How to add themes to version 5.99/6

Software
1

I stumbled into this repo: https://github.com/pointhi/kicad-color-schemes.
Using the nightly builds, I see a combobox in Preferences > EESchema > Color with the default Kicad Theme.

I read the README:

KiCad 6 is changing to a JSON-based colour theme system. Recent nightly builds already support the new system, where each colour theme lives in a JSON file in the colors directory of the user settings path (see “How to use a colour theme” above.)

To use the JSON version of a theme, just copy the file into your colors directory.

But inside my ~/.config/kicad directory there isn’t such a colors directory.
I tried to create that directory and I copied the repo inside, but no themes were added to the combobox.

Please, where I need to put those directories in order to can choose among those themes from the Preferences dialog?

1 Like
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You should have a ~/.config/kicad/5.99 directory. Put the colors folder inside that. All user settings, including color themes, are now in subdirectories for each KiCad major/minor release. This lets us automatically upgrade settings files without breaking compatibility with old versions (so you can run old and new versions next to each other).

2 Likes
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Fixed. But there were two more problems:

You should have a ~/.config/kicad/5.99 directory.

That was my first fault: the correct directory is ~/.config.kicadnightly/5.99.

Put the colors folder inside that.

This is not going to work. After some trials I had to put inside the colors folder the json files only!
It seems that kicad does not explore sub-directories to find out all the available jsons!

4

I wonder if you have specified that yourself or does it come from the package which you have installed. IIRC It’s possible to override the default location (which is ~/.config/kicad/5.99) compile time.

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I didn’t changed the default one. First I installed the stable kicad package (that created the ~/.config/kicad folder). Then I removed that and installed the nightly packages, and now I discovered that they created this new folder.

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You didn’t tell which platform you use and what/from where packages you use, so it’s impossible to say if they have a different settings location. But it’s not important now when you have found the directory.

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We should probably figure out which distributions are doing packaging things like this and make sure they know that they don’t need to anymore.

Yes, you have to just put your color theme JSON files in the colors directory, no subdirectories are searched.

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I’m using Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit and I followed the procedure described here to install: https://kicad.org/download/ubuntu/. Even the kicad-nightly-libraries and kicad-nightly-templates were not available.

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You don’t need templates or nightly libraries to test 5.99.

There have been problems with Ubuntu 20.04 and KiCad packages. There have been several questions and threads about that.

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Got it. I don’t want to “test” it, but to use it. Because it has some basic features that simplify my life…

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Are you fully aware that it’s unstable and even the file formats are in flux so that you may loose you data?

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